Toog goes Karaoke

[imomus]

Toog caught the train from Paris to Berlin this weekend to sign to Karaoke Kalk, the esteemed boutique label and home of cute formalists like Takeo Toyama. On Monday Toog was in Kreuzberg mastering his new album 'Lou Etendue', a somewhat Gainsbourgian homage to Asia Argento produced by Digiki.

Apart from clocking the Amplify festival with its rustling, crackling and scuffling sounds, we also admired the trous de balle at the Pergamon Museum (where an archeologist from Oakland asked us both for autographs!), lunched with my sister, whose boyfriend is in Berlin shooting production stills on the new film from Fernando (City of God) Meirelles, looked at photos of Trabants and Hitler in the new I.M. Pei-designed Deutsches Historisches Museum (they currently have a nice show tracing the history of German advertising), caught an intimate turntable performance by Otomo Yoshihide at the Neurotitan record store and gallery in Mitte, hung out with Donna Summer (aka WFMU's Jason Forrest; he's just found a big apartment in Mitte and plans to stay here in Berlin for several months), saw new East European art at Kunst-Werke and the tail end of the Designmai exhibition, as well as an Anne Laplantine turntable installation, again at Neurotitan.

By the way, congratulations to Anne for the honorary mention she gets for her Hamburg album in the 2004 Ars Electronica prize list!

Comments

[dopplerivets.livejournal.com]

i agree. the accidental,(paraphrased) is a way of putting parameters (or parentheses) around the difference between what is ideally intentended and what is perceived contingently(the way things work, or don't, as it happens). i used to make use of this strategy(oblique?)too. in the time before big science(samplers and cdr's) or at least my awareness of it/(them), i used to make 'audio collages' out of recorded radio static and other random tidbits put to tape(household appliances, interceptions of neighbors telephone conversations by my radio shack walkie talkies, candy bars etc.) then i would chop it all up 'staccato style' making full use of start/stop/pause button technology and loop it by dubbing and redubbing between machines(a walkman and double sided tape deck patched together to work like an amateurish multitracker)all the while adding more and more stuff into the mix. over time the original and consequent layers would be drowned out by endless overdubbing, but it thrilled me to think that they were still there somewhere, inaudably but subliminally affecting the way it sounded(i had this idea about the attractive nature of an initial magnetic imprinting being the sonic equivalent of a basement in a building). a piece wasn't something i finished and then became ready to be listened to, it was just something i was always doing(we call this "the process" now, i guess.)only having a few cassetes and no money helped me keep my artistic integrity as a kid. when i got my first c.d. player, i tried to find the limits of it's musical capabilities too(recording a song onto tape and then using two sets of speakers to 'dopple' the sound and cause chorused rounds(or by putting pressure on the tape wheel, messing with the pitch by slowing it all down). my favorite thing was using a dry erase pen to make tiny markings on 'spooky sounds' and intrument sample c.d.'s causing them to skip and then isolating the good bits and copying them. i'm still doing pretty much the same things as when i was like six. i keep making the same mistakes, i just don't have as many or as good of ideas as i did then. but, iv'e got fancier equipment.